[db-wg] Action item 47.2: Proposal for Adding Abuse Contact

On Apr 08, MarcoH <marcoh at marcoh.net> wrote:

> > Did you request an IRT object for your organisation and implement it?
> > It only took me a couple of hours as I mentioned some time ago.

> That's not the problem. The problem is that the IRT-object will only carry
> the more generic e-mail attribute. From the operational experience I have,
> it looks like a lot of 'users' have trouble to distinguish all the e-mail
> atrributes and mail addresses in the whois output and find the correct
> one.
> 
> The abuse-mailbox: attribute should be clear to everybody and makes
> automation much easier for the generic user, who never read the database
> specs, but only looks at the raw whois output.
I do not believe this is true. Many operators in the last years pointed
at the correct address with detailed explanations in natural language
(usually in english, possibly translated as well) and even ASCII art.
Yet some users still send mail to the wrong address. I think that the
issue here is more complex than "users do not know the semantics of
the contacts of inetnum objects".
If a well marked abuse at domain address is ignored, I can't see why
abuse-c or even abuse-mailbox: would be easier to understand.

Clueless users do not use port 43 whois, they usually paste an IP
address in some web-based gateway. If the requirement is to provide
end users an idiot-proof way to look up the abuse contact for a domain
then RIPE could as well install a CGI prominently linked from
www.ripe.net which would first look for an IRT object, fall back to
tech-c if needed and then report back only the relevant email address.

-- 
ciao, |
Marco | [5615 es25qV8fvhotg]